SSB does not take itself very seriously at all, and it doesn’t have to since it’s just meant to be fun.  Dissidia takes itself quite seriously though, and it sucks the life right out of the game.  Good guys and bad guys collectively reprise their roles to butt heads in the Final Fantasy meta-dimension, which ends up feeling more like a purgatory than the staging area of an epic battle between good and evil.

Dissidia is tries too hard to be something that it’s not.  I’m not sure how it’s supposed to appeal to fans of the series, let alone people who aren’t.  As a fan myself, the large majority of the game was pretty cringe-inducing.  Each character is stripped of any context (setting, friends, mission, etc.) and becomes a walking cliché of him or herself.  The confrontations between these (in)famous characters are also either totally rehashed or don’t amount to much more than fan fiction.  The melodrama of one Final Fantasy is tolerable, but concentrating it from every game in the series must qualify as cruel and unusual punishment.

Characters and story are in large part irrelevant to the game play though.  After you’ve adopted a character to play as you are transported to a series of game boards.  Once there, you have to navigate amongst an array of enemies.  When you engage them you move to another stage and begin a three-dimensional battle where conventional physics are thrown out the window.  You can fly, slide, and flip around the screen with relative ease which is pretty entertaining.

During battle, you have the choice between using “bravery” attacks or HP (hit point) attacks.  By attacking your opponent’s bravery you will increase your own which also increases the strength of your HP attacks.  When a character’s HP hits zero they lose the battle.  The Bravery/HP dynamic in combination with high-flying action (which seem to be inspired by the CG animated film Final Fantasy VII: Avent Children) make these battles the highlight of the game.  But there is a steep learning curve to the three-dimensional controls, which require many combinations of button presses to pull off effectively.

Another problematic aspect of the battle system is that there are too many numbers on the screen at any given time.  They are the result of all the formulas and calculations churning in the background, indicating precisely how your character stacks up in battle.  They don’t really need to be there though and only serve as a distraction.  It is a feature that’s meant to appeal to fans of the series who are are looking for role-playing elements mixed within Dissidia’s fighting game formula.  It provides immediate feedback for meticulous minimizing and maximizing of different character attributes and equipment, but doing that is a lot like doing your taxes.

There is a great deal of character customization which also ends up steepening the game’s learning curve even more.  This level of customization works well with games that have more substantial campaigns or that emphasize exploration, but in a fighting game like Dissidia it feels fruitless.  Instead of building individual characters, the game would have been more interesting if it had let the player build a party of less complex characters, and then engaging them in battles that better reflect what’s presented in the game’s introduction.